Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 20, 2016

I recently joined an applied research group at Georgia Tech, the Wearable Computing Center (WCC).

WCC is interdisciplinary and skilled in both technology development and communication. The group works with industry through contract services or on an ongoing basis. So if you are a sports team that isn’t getting desired results from athlete performance technology, the Center can create an educational workshop that gets your organization on the same page technically. WCC can also develop custom technology to help achieve unmet objectives. If you are a sports technology vendor, WCC can help with content, service designs, user interfaces and business models. Please get in touch if I can tell you more or if you have questions I can answer.

You are also invited to check out the blog at http://sports.bradstenger.com where I am writing essays that work on making sense of the rapid and often technical advances in sports science. The blog is to be a staging area for reports that should go on sale in early-2017. If your organization needs custom research into an applied sports science issue, please get in touch.

Thanks.
-Brad Stenger

The NFL season is upon us and there’s something—or rather someone—that many of the top players have in common: Brett Bartholomew.

Bartholomew, who is the director of performance at the Los Angeles-based gym Unbreakable and the owner of the start-up Bartholomew Strength, has served as the strength and conditioning coach to the league’s best, including 2016 Super Bowl MVP Von Miller and All-Pro tight end Rob Gronkowski. I recently caught up with Bartholomew, whose lessons on strength, speed, and power can be applied to just about any sport or fitness routine. “The principles I use with my NFL guys apply to all athletes,” says Bartholomew. “Strength is strength.”

Heavy shoes slow you down by forcing you burn more energy at a given pace. But by how much, exactly?

Studies dating back to the 1980s have shown that for every additional 100 grams (3.5 ounces) per shoe, you burn about 1 percent more energy. In theory, running speed and energy cost are proportional, so a 1-percent increase in mass should roughly correspond to a time that’s 1 percent slower.

But that claim has seldom been tested in practice, so that’s what a team in Rodger Kram’s Locomotion Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder, led by post-doctoral researcher Wouter Hoogkamer, decided to explore in a new study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

I visited Saracens rugby club last week. They are the holders of the Premiership, as well as the both the Anglo-Welsh Cup and the European Champions Cup, and it is not difficult to see why.

They are constantly looking to innovate. One change was the creation of a crèche at the club’s training ground in St Albans. This may seem a bit of a leap for a sports club (I have rarely seen it elsewhere) but it is underpinned by powerful logic.

“We wanted to provide an opportunity for the partners of the players to meet, to have a coffee and chat, to feel like part of a family,” Mark McCall, the head coach, said. “That leads to a broadening and deepening of relationships of the players, too. This has an impact on the culture of the club, the sense of togetherness, and, ultimately, upon performance.”

Saracens have measured the level of communication between the players by mic-ing them up in training matches. They have found that the quality and frequency of communication has increased over time, as the players have developed greater familiarity on and off the pitch. This, in turn, improves coordination and mutual anticipation.

They took me through other innovations, some inspired by visiting other sports teams, others by visiting other industries. “We bring in a philosopher on a regular basis to debate with the players, to make them think about issues within the game and beyond,” David Jones, the psychologist, said. “We want to develop more rounded people, stronger characters, and better leaders.”

Nic Gill never gets nominated for any awards, or paraded before the media. In fact you would probably struggle to pick the All Blacks’ long-time strength and conditioning man out in a lineup, so low-key is his profile.

But there’s a growing school of thought that he just might be the key, unheralded factor in the All Blacks’ continued domination of world rugby. Among the superstar players and the master coaches, those closest to the game believe Gill provides the X-factor ingredient that continues to keep the New Zealanders ahead of the chasing pack.

If there is a forte of the All Blacks under Steve Hansen it’s their ability to finish matches just as strongly as they start them. When tests go into that final quarter, inevitably it’s the New Zealanders finding a level that others simply can’t match.

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola explains why it is so important for his players to look after themselves off the field as they prepare to face Bournemouth in the Premier League on Saturday. [video, pre-roll + 1:37]

… Guardiola has brought his backroom staff with him from Bayern Munich and they immediately set about changing the club’s approach in several different areas.

The players’ lounge at the Etihad Stadium has been moved and the squad are now encouraged to eat together after matches in a bid to regulate their diet, while certain foods such as pizza – a post-match staple in recent seasons – have been banned completely.

The squad are also allowed to stay at home with their families the night before home matches, rather than report to the training ground’s accommodation, in a move designed to change their relaxation habits.

Guardiola, who has anywhere between 10 and 20 staff with him on the bench on match days, believes that so far the results have been positive: “The most expensive thing for the club is the one player who is injured,” he said on Friday.

Let’s say you’re making a hard choice, one that could impact your life significantly. Every time you think you’ve settled on something, the other option tugs you back to its side. You end up where you started: It’s a draw.

Should you make ever-more-detailed lists of pros and cons and seek advice from even more trusted sources? Or should you go with your gut?

Many people would suggest the latter: Listen to your gut, or your heart, or some other part of your body that couldn’t possibly know what those stock options will be worth in five years. For the advice-giver, “Just do what feels right!” is safe guidance to offer, since if you nudged the decision-maker toward a huge mistake, at least they’d feel good making it.

But according to the research of Jennifer Lerner, a professor of public policy and management at Harvard, that might be the exact wrong way to go about it. In a series of studies she recently published with Christine Ma-Kellams at the University of La Verne in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, she found that, in a task where managers were trying to detect an interviewee’s emotions, they assessed the situation more accurately when they thought systematically, than when they just relied on intuition.

BACKGROUND:

Wearable resistance training (WRT) provides a means of activity- or movement-specific overloading, supposedly resulting in better transference to dynamic sporting performance.
OBJECTIVE:

The purpose of this review was to quantify the acute and longitudinal metabolic, kinematic and/or kinetic changes that occur with WRT during walking, running, sprint running or jumping movements.
DATA SOURCES:

PubMed, SPORTDiscus, Web of Science and MEDLINE (EBSCO) were searched using the Boolean phrases (limb OR vest OR trunk) AND (walk* OR run* OR sprint* OR jump* OR bound*) AND (metabolic OR kinetic OR kinematic) AND (load*).
STUDY SELECTION:

A systematic approach was used to evaluate 1185 articles. Articles with injury-free subjects of any age, sex or activity level were included.
RESULTS:

Thirty-two studies met the inclusion criteria and were retained for analysis. Acute trunk loading reduced velocity during treadmill sprint running, but only significantly when loads of 11 % body mass (BM) or greater were used, while over-the-ground sprint running times were significantly reduced with all loads (8-20 %BM). Longitudinal trunk loading significantly increased jump performance with all loads (7-30 %BM), but did not significantly improve sprint running performance. Acute limb loading significantly increased maximum oxygen consumption and energy cost with all loads (0.3-8.5 %BM) in walking and running, while significantly reducing velocity during sprint running.
LIMITATIONS:

The variation in load magnitude, load orientation, subjects, testing methods and study duration no doubt impact the changes in the variables examined and hence make definitive conclusions problematic.
CONCLUSIONS:

WRT provides a novel training method with potential to improve sporting performance; however, research in this area is still clearly in its infancy, with future research required into the optimum load placement, orientation and magnitude required for adaptation.

Patrick Paumen doesn’t have to worry about forgetting his keys and being locked out of his apartment. That is because he doesn’t need a key anymore—he simply unlocks the door with a wave of his hand.

The 32-year-old IT expert from the Dutch city of Heerlen is one of a growing number of people with electronic implants under their skin, mostly to use as keys or for identification.

Mr. Paumen has several such implants, or tags, embedded in the fatty tissue of his hands and his lower arm. He uses separate tags to unlock not only his apartment door, but also his office and the gate to a secure parking lot at work. Another stores information he would otherwise put on a business card—name and contact details—and yet another holds similar information for nonbusiness encounters.

The implants can be activated and scanned by readers that use radio frequency identification technology, or RFID. Those include ordinary smartphones and readers already installed in office buildings to allow entrance with a common ID card.

The Chem-Phys patch monitors both biochemical and electric signals in the human body at the same time a first San Diego, CA, May 23, 2016 — Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed the first flexible wearable device capable of monitoring both biochemical and electric signals in the human body. The Chem-Phys patch records electrocardiogram (EKG) heart signals and tracks levels of lactate, a biochemical that is a marker of physical effort, in real time.

The device can be worn on the chest and communicates wirelessly with a smartphone, smart watch or laptop. It could have a broad range of applications, from athletes monitoring their workouts to physicians monitoring patients with heart disease.

Nanoengineers and electrical engineers at the UC San Diego Center for Wearable Sensors worked together to build the device, which includes a flexible suite of sensors and a small electronic board. The device also can transmit the data from biochemical and electrical signals via Bluetooth.

Don’t let the Theranos saga fool you: we’ve entered a new era of self-quantification, in which on-demand blood testing is sold as the easy way to fine-tune your training and nutrition. Can an algorithm really replace your coach?

As scientists in the biomedical fields are generating more and more diverse data, the real elaine-m-faustmanquestion today is not only how to make data “sharable” or “open”, but also, and especially, useful and reusable. At Scidatacon 2016, speakers from funding agencies, research universities, data research institutions, and the publishing industry came together to try to address this key question.

Around 20 highly interdisciplinary papers organized in four busy sessions addressed the problem from different perspectives, while agreeing on an essential point: developing new, open frameworks and guidelines is not enough. Indeed, what characterized this last edition of Scidatacon was a focus on proposing and discussing applicable solutions that can address the management, use, and reuse of large scale datasets in biomedicine today, right now.

… Q: What is NFL’s goal with this new research money, why is it disbursing it now, and how should independent neuroscientists go about applying for it?

A: In order to disburse that funding in a transparent and peer-reviewed manner, the NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine (HNS) Committee will work with a new, independent Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). The SAB will comprise leading physicians, scientists, and other experts to identify the most compelling proposals for research into concussions, head injuries, and the long-term effects. The members of the new, independent SAB will be announced by the end of September. We anticipate it will consist of five to seven individuals with expertise in traumatic brain injury, as well as medical areas relevant to the players’ health and safety. The SAB will work with members of the medical committees, including the HNS Committee, to establish research priorities and to develop request for funding proposals.

… “All of our clubs are doing some data analysis (on players),” Jeff Agoos, who serves as Vice-President for Competition at MLS, said in July during the All-Star break in a roundtable discussion titled “Future of Soccer” in San Jose. “Wearables are a big part of that.”

Wearables, similar to ones used by joggers, can track a player’s movements, allowing MLS teams to scout talent and even help to prevent injuries. The data obtained could also help coaches make decisions and help players improve any weaknesses.

“We see data as inevitable coming into the game,” said Agoos.

For example, the league’s partnership with car maker Audi to create the Audi Player Index. That’s a new way for fans to quantify a players’ performance. At a recent pick-up game in New York City, Philadelphia Union players CJ Sapong and Maurice Edu coached two teams demonstrating soccer technology. Audi showed off what it could look like if the Audi Player Index happened in real time, using OPTA data, and displayed on a players jersey. It was just another technological innovation that could make its way to fans when they watch a game on TV.

There will be a sellout in here on Saturday, the 350th in a row, continuing a streak that began more than a half-century ago. As much as any program in college football, if not more so, tradition reigns at Nebraska, and it wears red.

But even old dogs — with all due respect — can learn new tricks.

There’s the Nebraska Athletic Performance Laboratory, a one-of-a-kind facility so ahead of the curve that the Cornhuskers have played host to several professional teams and athletes looking for an added edge.

There’s the second-year coach, Mike Riley, who leads the unbeaten Cornhuskers into a matchup with No. 21 Oregon, an old nemesis from his long tenure at rival Oregon State. Along with bringing a new offense, Riley has rejuvenated the program’s recently sluggish recruiting efforts.